Scorching heat, and clouds

It was another hot weekend. Too hot to hike. I decided to drive around a little yesterday afternoon to see if I could find anything to take a picture of. Something not too far away from my air conditioned truck. After all, I didn't want the camera to get too hot. You know, my Spot satellite messenger is the only gadget I have that is designed to operate at temperatures over 105 degrees F. I'm glad it is, but what's with all this other stuff? Why is it all made so wimpy? Canon sells a camera (the D10) that is advertised to be rugged. It can be dropped 4 feet without damage. It's water proof to 30 feet. It operates down to 14 degrees F, but only up to 104. My truck thermometer didn't show a temperature below 108 as I drove around. It was around 110 to 111 most of the time.

I wandered around a short time at the end of Idaho road to get some pictures. It wasn't long before my bottle of water was getting too hot to drink. The air was still. I tried to keep my camera out of the sun. There were some nice clouds around, though, and I wanted to get some pictures.

The really nice thing was that there were no gnats! I don't know where they go when it gets really hot, but I'm glad they do.

OK, it's time for another JPEG vs. pseudo HDRI comparison. Since I like to see detail in clouds, I think the HDRIs win this time.

Not much detail can be seen in these clouds.

Here you can see the detail.

This is a little interesting.

This may be over the top, though.

The clouds are completely washed out here.

This is better.

Blah.

Better.

Click below to see all of the pictures. Let me know what you think.

2009_06_28